NEW NOVELS

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21986, 9 January 1937, Page 15

NEW NOVELS

MR MACDONELL’S SATIRE Lords and Masters. By A. G. Macdoncll. Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 356 pp. James Hanson made an immense fortune by arming Cimbria for its war witH Suevonia; then he multiplied it by exploiting the iron and coal concessions of the new state of Cimbro-Suevonia; then he retired from the direction of Hanson, "Wendelmann and Company to 44 Partington Crescent, Kensington. Hanson did not want another war; it might have destroyed his wealth, and much besides. All he wanted was the armed peace which is the arma-ment-maker’s secure paradise. But a fool of a chemist discovered how to use gloxite, a worthless substance found only in Cimbro-Suevonia, to harden steel; and Sir Montague Anderton-Mawle knew very well how to trick the fool out of the control and profit of his discovery and how to swing the Patriotic Government into a programme of rearmament with the new steel. War, of course, was inevitable, because Germany, having no gloxite, must strike and get it before the want of it made her powerless. At this point, to defeat Anderton-Mawle, to prevent war, to destroy gloxite, Hanson stepped back into the ring . ; . He failed; but Mr MacDonell should not bo anticipated in the irony and tragedy of his close. So much for the framework of this hard-driven satire. What should be added is that it is driven with unrelenting ferocity at object after object: not the armament traffic only but high finance, politics, militarism and the military mind, imperialism, anti-Semitism, snobbery, the law, and so on. Hanson has two stupid, vain sons in the army and another, clever and pompous and the dupe of his own ambitions, in Parliament. His charming, simpleton daughter Eleanor adores and marries handsome Major Jack Crawford, as revolting a -specimen of a revolting type as has ever been drawn. Anderton-Mawle and his associates are an odious pack, tiger, jackal, and. donkey. But it is not ail done in the way of heavy slamming, by any means. • Many of Mr MacDonell’s chapters are brilliant with the lighter play of his sardonic wit, and some pages break into a fun which is almost farce. What is chiefly at fault, perhaps, in this abundantly meritorious and engrossing book is that there is not enough white to throw into contrast and emphasis the satirical black of knavery and folly. But few readers will pause to question. THE MONEY POWER They Call It Peace. By Irene Rathbone. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 617 pp. * “At the foot of the Cenotaph, as darkness came down, lay, among the flowers, the green and white'wreath. On the label attached were written the words: Tn memory of those who died in vain.’ ” The green and white are the colours of the Army of Life, the army of the Green Shirts, whose cause is the truth and the lifibt which are to end the follies and wickednesses of a world almost automatically under the tyranny of a false theory of money and purchasing power. The young man, David Berington, is the figure in whom are dramatised the realisation of old error and the energy to set up right in its place; and in the history of his family and others Miss Rathbone exhibits the misrule of the “money power,” the orthodox hierarchy of Mammon. Their individual distresses and defeats are linked with the larger consequences of financial ifisanity, acclaimed as sound finance”: the Great War and its industrial and social legacy, the general strike of 1926, the “economic crisis” of 1931, and so on. The novel is heavily laden, obviously, with propaganda; and those will find it easiest to read who are most inclined to accept Miss Rathbone’s interpretation of the facts and her social credit solution of the problem they set up. DARK PASTORAL Windless Sky. By Fritz Faulkner. The Hogarth Press. 295 pp. This is a first novel in which achievement calls for no indulgence. Mr Faulkner fills his scene, which is a small and isolated part ol the American mid-west, 60 years ago, with characters whose lives arid spirits seem to emerge from it and be controlled by it. They have much of the blind force, the irrational ferocity, the yet unaccountable and uncontrolled autonomy which belong* to wild nature and which long resist the pioneer’s axe, laid to mere trees, or the plough that can only tear crude soil. The wildness. oi wild places is tamed more slowly than their surfaces; and it does noi yield except to blood and nervei which it has invaded. Hedman, the man whose power in the small rura. community is complete, wields it, il seems, with the unconscious authority of nature; his sons and others act, according to conventional standards and normal psychology, witl: irresponsible violence; but it is as they must, as a stream gathers heac and sweeps on or as an underminec stone crashes down a hillside. Mr Faulkner’s dark pastoral is wntter in a style which his theme seems tc have called up and formed in its strenuousness and sensuous simplicity. ELIZABETHAN Maid of Honour. By Magdalen King Hall. Peter Davies. 317 pp. Before Anne Verey went to Queer Elizabeth’s Court as Maid of Honour, a fortunate escape from i tyrant' stepmother, she, married ir secret haste a lover whom the tyram scorned, one Robin Ashe, a gentle man but poor; and not long after he must decide to voyage with Su Christopher Lee in search of the North-west Passage, begging Anne to become his wife in fact as wel as form before they sailed. They were discovered by the Virgir Queen, who banished Anne from the Court.in a rage; and then, Anne; fame thus clouded, she became i pawn in the hands of her stepmother and her horrid Uncle Nicholas, who planned, by marrying her to the Irish noble, O’Roig, tc buy off this barbarous fellow’s clam to Nicholas’s estates in Munster. A this point it is best to break off the summary of a story which rushe; under full sail of dramatic and pic turesque interest to the end. It i; animated, fresh, and pungently writ ten. Readers whom Miss King-Hal has accustomed to the gay, disre spectful use of her wit, will be surprised, perhaps, by her success ir ballasting and steadying. it. .

COMMUNITY Co-op. A Novel of Living Together. By Upton Sinclair. T, Werner Laurie Ltd. 415 pp. “Quite a decision for the President of the United States to make, ' j with all the businessmen of America : pulling him one way and all the ( idealists and dreamers of social i justice pulling him the other! • • • i What was Franklin D. Roosevelt go- . ing to answer?” . This, the question at the end or Upton Sinclair’s new novel, is timed ■ for the eve of the Presidential elec- . tions; and the question was, quite simply, whether Roosevelt would grant the San Sebastian Self-Help Exchange the loan necessary to its final and complete establishment as a successful experiment in co-opera-tive living, with “new freedom and independence for all workers. SigSoren, “ex-sailor, ex-convict, and builder of humanity,” who went to Washington to petition the President, was given kind, courteous, evasive words to feed his hope on. Behind him, in San Sebastian, lay the history of a long struggle, m which the parts of 80 or 90 individuals are detailed in this story, and the crisis out of which must come either the triumph of social and eco- ' nomic justice or the crash into failure. The question at the close leaves the crisis unresolved. It takes all Upton Sinclair’s earnestness and passion to sustain the propagandist weight of this novel through its great length. POOR OLD ENGLAND Cross-Doublc-Cross. By Lewis Masefield. Putnam. 331 pp. Mr Lewis Masefield, the son of the Poet Laureate, has written a first novel which will amuse most readers who like a menagerie of freakish figures, rushing and sidling and backing and twisting in crazypolitical evolutions, and are pleased to be able to detect, every now and then, in the fantastic pattern some ludicrous resemblance to the more de corous comedy of contempora > pol Sics. Mr Belloc did this sort of thing, once, hitterly enough, Mr Masefield’s England of 1950 is a wilder- stage, and the fun has little sting. The Socialist Government breaks in panic and a silly takes its place; the Conservativ party has been captured by a Hous tonian lady with a naval mama, politicians switch and _shuffle from side to side in their dizzy pursuit of power; the chief lunatic is. an eminento in the armaments game who drinks like a fish, drivels ?bout the Aztecs, and lives on an aer °" drome float in mid-Atlantic. Let nobody seek a meaning m the book but rejoice in as many flashes of sense as leap from the nonsense. MOVE ON AGAIN The Fool and the Tractor. By Lennox Kerr. Collins. 284 pp. Mr Kerr’s English hero, Anthony, ends his luckless adventures, in Australia, at the point of going home to be comforted and rested, but ' not to remaih. He knew that now. He was going on until he found what he wanted His chin was hard and his eyes determined. He would find it and he would possess it. His adventures—in salesmanship, sea-faring, real estate agency, and farming, for instance —all begin in confidence, due' to his hopeful credulity that at last life can be made splendid. He is nearer, at last, to understanding that he must expect less of the world and exact more of himself than ever before, i He knows what his friend Joe i means, as he lifts up the sheep in i the trucks: “You get a bit tired of ■ heaving stupid animals to their [ feet. . . But Mr Kerr does not I quite assure us of the strength in ■ him that will rise above his softness i and pliancy to hold the resolution • of the moment at which we leave ■ him; and it is perhaps part of the ; significance of this book that the : assurance is withheld. [ PENELOPE ■ All Quiet at Home. By Josephine Kanun. Longmans, Green and Co. 327 pp, ' Penelope’s life in Golder’s Green is, pieced together in a humdrum pattern of domesticity, with three b children, a complaining mother, a clumsy maid, a grumpy husband, and an impressionable friend to 1 provide its episodes. The comedy of ■ this petty, dull round, as Miss , Kamm describes it, is of course for f the observer to see, not for Penelope , to feel; and she embraces the opj portunity of relief from it in the at--1 tentions of her husband’s friend Alan 1 and in the delightful complications l of having a lover. But these be--1 come embarrassing when her friend i Marion is infected with Buchmanism and the infection spreads, until the ' “change” works out in a dissolu- % tion of every relation but her bond s to grumpy Walter —not so grumpy, ■r indeed, but kind and wise and f affectionate enough to think of a good dinner, cocktails, and a theatre f at exactly the right . time. Miss \ Karan’s story is clever, pungent, ® and agreeable. 1 SINCLAIR NOEL BRODIE DYSART 5 Fort in the Jungle. By P, C. Wren, ’ John Murray. 320 pp. Through 1 Whitcomhe and Tombs Ltd. s 1 This is Dysart’s third adventure, * and “Action and Passion” and “Sin- \ bad the Soldier” have prepared for 3 it a multitudinous welcome. Dysart’s s section of the Foreign Legion in - the Annamese jungle is wiped out in an attack on their fort by bandits. The sole survivor, he is dispatched to fresh adventures on in- " telligence service, which leads him, amid endless perils, to tfie tragedy of a great love ended in death. It is difficult to think of any other writer who can sustain, as Captain a Wren does, so prodigious an attack i on nerves and sentiment. I NANCY’S OWN STORY f. The Browns Are Different, By Ruth 1 Bradbury. Methuen and Co. Ltd. 0 277 pp. ■ 1 3 ■ • , , ■ The Browns were suburban, but 7 “different.” They lived on the best g side of the avenue, at No. 4; but s they never used the number. They a called their semi-detached house - Effingham Lodge “to counteract the H other half of our, semi-detachment “ —‘The Bijou’ needs quite a lot of d living down.” ■ And Lydia Nancy t Brown, who tells their story, -cone tinues. to, prove their “difference” ail s the way. For instance, she wanted - to .be a film star, which-“just shows s you that I am a very unusual girl, - for I am sure no other girl in Murd--1 ston Park has such ambitious ideas.” - Nahcy’s unusual relatives, the un- . usual friends of the family,, the un--3 J usual importance of being somebody and keeping nobodies, .at a proper

AESTHETE’S PILGRIMAGE Atlantic Crossing. By G. Wilson J Knight. J. M. Dent and Sons l<td. 337 pp. (10/6 net.) The contrast between the stream of consciousness method of the j romance-autobiography-travel story v called “Atlantic Crossing” and the a straight narrative with trimmings e of a Peter Fleming is not to the ad- a vantage of Mr Wilson Knight. He t is too discursive, too airy, too ab- r sorbed in his own emotional pro- r cesses, too ready to abandon a line t of thought. In fact his tale often be- t comes positively irritating, and the r feeling of suspense is unwarrantably strained. There are three portions: Canada, the Atlantic, England. In the first he meets a charming young woman, in the second he seems to t win her affection, in the third he 1 loses her. (This love story is the a most thoroughly completed and satis- j lying part of the book.) But the first section also covers the young man s I life, school, war, service in various t places, work (as a school master), f and travel. The war-passages are j good and a deserve a plainer setting, . as they cover a fresh set of expert- r ences: the doings of a dispatch- , rider, who became the fastest motor- = cyclist in the Eastern Army. The second part is the most philosophical, c and abounds in speculations and out- * spoken opinions about war, politics, . and sexual feelings and manners. These do not gain for being emitted ' with the force and random distribution of a shrapnel bombardment. By the way there are dropped f pieces of stark writing, one gruesome paragraph describing with horrible realism the onset of a bout of seasickness. i Most readers will appreciate “Atlantic Crossing” best as the portrait of a contemporary aesthete. The word aesthete has no belittling , connotation, for Mr Wilson Knight ( is a man whose emotional and artis- ( tic sensitiveness is real and : communicable, and he is a writer whose 1 skill in direct, if unconventional i literary criticism is here shown to < be more than adequate for plain _de- | scription, for fanciful day-dreaming, j and for satire. Mr Wilson ! Knight , found his place in life through Shakespeare. He is a university < teacher, and became a teacher and writer because he wished to give ; others the emotional changes that i he suddenly began to feel when 1 reading Shakespeare. His chapter headings are from such men as C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot, but there is nothing high-brow and little that is precious about him. He can rhapsodise about “Sunshine Susie” and Eddie Cantor, . whose “Roman Scandals,” like other sound men, he admires very much. Mr Wilson Knight takes himself too seriously; he is called by the young woman “Ivor,” from his resemblance to Ivor Novello; but he perceives his own solemnity and does not spare himself. It is this seriousness, however, which mars his tale. The impressionistic style should give a sensation of easy flow and inconsequential musing, whereas Mr Wilson Knight’s ramblings appear too conscientiously dynamic. A small 'and unimportant quotation may illustrate the point. His first partner was heavy, with wooden conversation and a wooden dance. Afterwards s'he asks what his book is. “H. G. Wells? What, on a boat?” Which makes him angry and self-conscious. Does she think an H. G. Wells novel highbrow? The palatial towers of dance fantasies Drove tin sheds when you get there.. Probably his dancing is at fault.

distance, the supremely unusual event of: becoming engaged to an unusually exciellent young officer in the army—such is. the fabric of this thoroughly pleasant story, in which Miss Bradbury brings off a difficult thing, really. She makes Nancy’s conviction that the Browns are “different” amusing, and keeps it amusing, without sharpening the fun into ridicule. ' ,